Veganuary

Not really one for making new year resolutions but my daughters took it upon themselves to stop eating any animal product for January. Veganuary is a UK based non-profit that encourages people worldwide to try a vegan diet for January as a compassionate response to the cruelty of animal farms and a responsible action against climate change.

Life, in its evolutionary sense, is an outcome of resistance to entropy. It is also the consequence of entropy. Parts of life in the ‘here&now’ decay but life in the ‘long run’ charts a course to survival of the selfish gene, sometimes benefiting from solidarity, sometimes at the expense of the ‘other’ but mostly indifferent. Responsive but not necessarily respectful of other life forms. Life takes a natural course through evolution toward extinction or diversity of individual components reacting to competition and environment.

Species propagation is a power struggle in nature via protein exchange… in other words ‘eating’. We eat so we are. There is always going to be the eater and the eaten, the predator and the prey. The former propagate in structured, individual or social settings while the latter evolves to continue existence through sheer preponderance. So, in nature, there usually are more gazelles and than cheetahs until a time comes when there aren’t enough gazelles and so less cheetahs survive to reproduce. This might be a crass oversimplification of reality, with its myriad permutations, but illustrates well the eternal balancing act of nature!

In this vector of evolutionary history, we humans find ourselves uniquely able to influence both environment and competition through the process of communication and second-hand knowledge. We are at a stage, at an aggregate, to find joy, purpose and meaning in fulfilling more than the biological imperative of survival and propagation that intuition defines within the building blocks of our existence. Collectively, we endeavor to increase our chances of existence by establishing collaborative structures of social functioning while there continue to exist pockets of ‘at-cost’ actions that seek survival in myopic steps – the constant struggle of the ‘here&now’ vs the ‘long run’!

As we continue to evolve in our social awareness toward lesser intra-species and cross-species harm – we wouldn’t dream of hurting our dog or cat but happily munch upon chicken… but at the same token even a few minutes of exposure to a live chicken interacting with you will elevate it from food to family member very quickly in most people – we humans are getting schizophrenic about our role in the food ecosystem. Very rarely would we look at a wildlife video and empathize with the cheetah and its cubs, but we do root for the gazelle to escape. While in the animal kingdom, predators taking prey life is natural, it is looked down upon and discouraged by organized governance within humans even though we are capable of it from an evolutionary perspective.

But the balance shifts heavily when the predator controls the creation of ‘prey’ life for the sole purpose of ‘prey’ship. This ‘life-giving’ is more horrendous than killing.

This is my argument against a meat-eating lifestyle. It is not just the fact that I’ve realized that other species on this protein-exchange taxonomy shouldn’t have to be involved in a zero-sum game of life for my lunch; it is the fact that my ballot and wallet can no longer support the thoughtlessness and in some cases hypocrisy of claiming a higher ground as a species while factory-creating life just so I can eat conveniently. We can surely kill for meat from a purely naturalistic position – ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ – but I choose to accept the responsibility that comes with having the power to understand our existence. The same understanding that has allowed our species to abolish slavery, enable same-sex relationships,

We have outsourced our protein harvesting to a specialized set of killers that raise animal crops for pure profit. We pay them to keep ourselves insulated from the psyche-hurting killing that we’d have to do to eat flesh. The killing of a familiar animal is even more soul-destroying! We pay the factory farms to artificially inseminate livestock in controlled environments reducing the entire existence of an animal, from birth to death; from the free, sometimes brutal, but mostly natural habitat that wild animals find themselves in to the cruel, thoughtless, torture chambers that our abattoirs and factory farms have become. When conditions are right, animals copulate in nature to produce offspring but to force reproduction to impose a substandard, captive, painful, hopeless life is something I cannot wrap my head around.

Of course, there is an inherent hypocrisy that I have to live with. I can only choose to not cause harm to animals because my basic needs are met and I don’t have to live in the Tundra or sub-Saharan Africa where food sources are limited. Extenuating circumstances abound in the thinking person’s eating habits or even their individual meals. Finding myself where I am, personally, I cannot bring myself to support an factory-farm industry. I stopped eating livestock four years ago in October 2016. I justified eating seafood (viz support industries that kill fish) by justifying it by claiming evolutionary distance and ergo lack of sapience as a factor of protein-exchange cruelty. In truth, I have let my greedy taste-buds overcome my progress on a journey towards knowingly causing as less harm as possible.

I’m hoping to fare better starting 2022. Have embarked on Veganuary at the start of 2022 and hoping a month of something might just stick through the year!